Top Tips for Improving Your Business Writing

So, you want to improve your business writing? Convert more customers? Communicate more clearly? Influence people’s decisions? Get people to take action? Here are our top tips for improving your business writing.

Well, it’s all within your reach and with just a few simple tweaks, you can craft more compelling messages that achieve more of your goals.

At WordGlue Marketing, we’re all about giving you the tools to become a better writer, so here are our top tips for improving your business writing.

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Top Tips for Improving Your Business Writing

Put Your Audience First

Life is always about give and take; if you want something from someone, then you’ve got to offer something in return.

What you offer might simply be information, but whatever you offer, it’s got to be clear to the reader. People’s time is valuable, and there are lots of things competing for it, so you’re writing has to stand out from the crowd.

One of the ways it can do this is by putting the recipient at the heart of the message. Ask yourself how can you craft your message around the recipient’s needs/feelings/wants whilst still achieving your goals?

For example, if you’re writing to inform someone about your returns policy:

Your goals might look like this:

• Avoid a bad review
• Replace the item rather than initiate a refund
• Earn a repeat customer through excellent service
• Encourage use of returns process

But your customer doesn’t really care about your goals, they care about what you can offer them, so your message will be focused around the recipient:

• We want you to have the perfect product
• So we make returns free and easy
• If you’re not 100% happy we offer a full refund

There’s nothing magical about these words, but they address your goals through the lens of what your customer needs, which makes them much more likely to be receptive to your message.

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Image by Christo Anestev from Pixabay

Know Your Goals

You’re not doing business writing just for the fun of it. Everything you write has a goal, whether it’s something you’re consciously aware of or not. If you’re not consciously aware of your goals though, the chances that you achieve them are much lower.

Say you’re writing a memo to inform people there is a fire safety meeting next Thursday at 10 am. Your goal isn’t necessarily to inform, it’s to make sure people show up at the meeting. If you’re not aware that this is your goal, then you’re less likely to craft a message that convinces people they should attend.

Before you start writing, you should have a good idea of what your goals are. Common goals include informing, influencing, getting people to take action, and finding out information, and the vast majority of your writing will fall into one of these categories.

Think carefully about what it is you want to achieve, and really focus in on it. If your goals aren’t obvious to you, then it won’t be clear to your reader what action you want them to take. Going back to our returns policy, we’ve crafted our message so that it’s about our audience, and now we want to finish it off by directly addressing our goal of getting people to use the returns service, this is where your calls to action come in and here’s what it might look like:

• Attach the return address sticker to your parcel
• Stick it in the post
• And we’ll process your replacement or refund the next day

Rather than just saying “you can return products, here’s our address,” we’ve pushed our goals by giving a clear call to action, outlining what the customer needs to do, and what they can expect from our business.

This translates to any piece of business writing you’re doing, so make sure you understand your goals, and you’re guiding the reader towards taking the actions you want them to take.

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Understand Your Target Audience

Different people respond to different messages, which means you really need to understand who you are writing for.

So, what does your target audience look like?

Before you start writing, picture your target audience, and ask yourself some important questions about them:

• How do they communicate?
• How do they get their information?
• What are their likes/dislikes?
• What do they want from your communication?
• How do they think?
• What challenges do they face?
• What objections might they have to your communication?

When you can answer these questions, it gives you a much better chance of writing something that resonates with the people you’re targeting.

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Don’t Overcomplicate Things

Writing is often sold as something that’s quite highbrow and academic. Because of this, people tend to think they need to make things sound fancy to impress people with their writing.

This is not the case though!

People don’t want to be reading complicated sentences where they have to go through it three times to understand what is meant.

You’ve got to value your reader’s time and this means making it simple for them.

Make sure you’re spacing your paragraphs out nicely so there aren’t huge chunks of text, and don’t use complicated words when simple ones will do.

Great business writing isn’t complicated, in fact, it takes complicated ideas and makes them straight forward. If there’s one simple way to improve your writing immediately, then it’s setting out to keep things simple.

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Image by Peter Kok from Pixabay

Takeaways

Top Tips for Improving Your Business Writing

For all its intricacies, business writing boils down to a few simple points:

• Understand your audience
• Put the recipient first
• Know what you want to achieve with each communication
• Keep it simple and focused

If you can consistently get these points right, then you’re going to see a much better response to your writing, and it will make a positive difference to your career and your business.

We’re always on hand to give you pointers on improving your business writing, so why not get in touch or leave a comment below, and we’ll get back to you with some advice.

We thrive on helping you turn your content creation into a 24/7 sales machine, saving you time and effort, so you can concentrate on the things that matter most in your business. 

Whether it’s writing articles, blog posts, social media posts, or more for your small business, we can help.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” 

Helen Keller